St. Teresa of Avila

This was for an RCIA talk on Teresa of Avila and I thought I'd repost it because her writings are very moving.

We look to the saints as heroes and heroines of the Church, yet we’re not called to be another Mother Theresa, John Bosco, or Francis of Assisi.  You’re called by God to be you and fully you and to enter into an intimate relationship with God through the persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The saints enter our lives so that we can learn from their successes, failures, and inspirations that they received from the one who loved them.  Many of them have stories and pasts that we can easily relate to and some others stories that inspire us to go beyond what we think our own limits are.  We seek the strength that they received from God and their companionship on our journey.  These saints are real people with real struggles and real success stories, because they knew in whom they should put their trust.

Let nothing disturb you,

Nothing dismay you.

All things are passing,

God never changes.

Patient endurance

Attains all things…

God alone suffices.

(Teresa’s Bookmark)

Teresa was born on March 28, 1515, in Avila, Spain “The City of Knights.”  The city was infused with the warrior spirit and stamped upon its citizens, and Teresa was not exempt from this attitude. 

“We ought to act as if we were at war – as, indeed, we are – and never relax until we have won the victory.” (Speaking of the spiritual life to her brother Lorenzo)

She was exceedingly beautiful and she knew it and even struggled at points with her vanity.  When she was 61, one of her friars, a former Italian artist, painted her portrait and her response to him was, “May God forgive you, Fray Juan, for you have made me look like a bleary-eyed old hag!”

She was a woman that longed to be loved passionately and in her own biography she speaks of how she flirted, danced, and fell in love in her teenage years.  She entered the convent when she was 20 and her passion towards relationships never really damped but they turned from frivolous love into a purer, more spiritual love.  Without knowing the love that dwelled in her relationships you’d find her correspondence with men scandalous even today, but she wasn’t completely free from occasionally becoming emotionally attached to these relationships.  For example she had a spiritual director for the last seven years of her life that was half her age that she teased about whether or not he loved her more than his own mother.

She was a powerhouse for prayer and focused in her spiritual masterpieces on the presence of God dwelling within us.  “I consider it impossible for us to pay so much attention to worldly things if we take the care to remember we have a Guest such as this within us, for we then see how lowly these things are next to what we possess within ourselves…You will laugh at me, perhaps, and say that what I’m explaining is very clear, and you’ll be right; for me though, it was obscure for sometime.  I understood well that I had a soul.  But what this soul deserved and who dwelt within it I did not understand because I had covered my eyes with the vanities of the world…If I had understood as I do now that in this little palace of my soul dwelt so great a King, I would not have left Him alone so often.  I would have remained with Him at times and striven more so as not to be so unclean.  But what a marvelous thing, that He would fill a thousand worlds and many more with His grandeur would enclose Himself in something so small!...Since He is Lord He is free to do what He wants, and since He loves us He adapts Himself to our size.” (Way of Perfection 28.10-11)

She began to reform the Carmelite Order when she was 45 with the help of St. John of the Cross, yet again another spiritual powerhouse.  The reform wasn’t an easy task and she faced stiff opposition during the Spanish Inquisition in front of which she was placed twice.  There were a few years in particular that the reform struggled greatly.  Teresa was exiled to a Castilian monastery and John of the Cross was imprisoned in Toledo.  The resistance to the reformation also included slanders of her spiritual director fathering a child with a loose-living woman he was ingenuously helping, there were people trying to intercept her correspondence during that time and she had come up with a series of pseudonyms for herself, those she was writing too, and even groups that she was referring too.  Ironically she referred to the Inquisitors as angels and the Grand Inquisitor as the Archangel.  Christ was Joseph and the Devil was a term that translates to Hoofy.  What got her through all of this persecution and suffering was a revelation years before during a period of great anxiety: “Do what lies in your power; surrender yourself to me, and do not be disturbed about anything.”

She was also a mystic, which speaks to the depth of her personal prayer and love for God.  This was something that developed over her life and she attributes her depth in prayer to the suffering that she endured.  “We suffer for love’s sake,” as she would say.  In some profound way, she came to experience that suffering makes us “ready” for God by hollowing us out and increasing our capacity for the divine.  Those who experience God deeply are those who have been prepared by trials.  She wrote to John of the Cross during his imprisonment “God’s treatment of His friends is terrible, though they have really nothing to complain of, as he did the same to His own Son.”

            “The important thing is not to think much but to love much; and so do that which best stirs you to love.  Perhaps we don’t know what love is.  I wouldn’t be very surprised because it doesn’t consist in great delight but in desiring with strong determination to please God in everything, in striving, insofar as possible, not to offend Him, and in asking Him for the advancement of the honor and glory of His Son.” (Interior Castle 4.1.7)

Excerpts from Teresa of Avila: Mystical Writings by Tessa Bielechki